Book: The Coming First World Debt Crisis

The Coming First World Debt Crisis.
Ann Pettifor, Palgrave Macmilllan.

This book was written in 2006 and is therefore prophetic. It comes from an author who was a co founder of Jubilee 2000 which campaigned for third world debt relief. She recaps on the recent decades when the 1970s oil crisis resulted in petrodollars being deposited into western banks then recycled into loans to poor countries. All was well until interest rates rose and the loans had been squandered or laundered by the elites. Then the populations had their health and educational services decimated and fees imposed so private corporations can profit, by the International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes. This is widely known.

The innovation from the book was to predict exactly the same dynamic would take place in the first world. The conjuring trick whereby money is created by the act of a person taking on a debt through the fractional reserve banking system is recapped. ( see the film “Money as Debt” for an easy introduction to this concept on youtube) .

So mortgages have been taken out in a lending spree and second homes have been as sure fire hit. Bankers bonuses have fuelled the lending and complex debt derivatives had temporarily masked the bad debt.

The solution is to move to a different economic and banking model. The book looks back beyond the 500year dominance of western civilisation by a debt system. It looks at old testament injunctions against usury and their operation in the first millennium AD. The Islamic system that also prohibits debt is also explored.